Monthly Archives: February 2013

I have a confession to make: I am addicted. In this blog entry I would like to warn you about it, so you don’t go the same route down as I did. Don’t follow me on that path, even if the temptation looks promising and convincing.

You don’t have a clue what I am talking about? I talking about conferences. I am addicted to them. In this blog entry I would like to foster my coming-out, and provide the things that make me addicted. Don’t fool yourself that you won’t become addicted. Stay away from conferences! Don’t go there!

I believe that the traditional software QA model is fundamentally and irretrievably broken.

I think there is something fundamentally broken in the way we are used to build and ship product. Triggered by Elisabeth I had an eye on stuff while starting to read The Psychology of Computer Programming only recently – yeah, I didn’t read all of Jerry’s books so far. Shame on me. These are my early raw thoughts on what might be broken.

Stick in software testing long enough, and you will see enough ideas come and go to be able to sort out the ones that look promising to work, and the ones that you just hope will go away soon enough so that no manager will pay any of her attention to it. There have been quite a few in the history of software testing, and from my experience the worst things started to happen every time when someone tried to replace a skilled tester with some piece of automation – whether that particular automation was a tool-based approach or some sort of scripted testing approach. A while ago, Jerry Weinberg described the problem in the following way:

When managers don’t understand the work, they tend to reward the appearance of work. (long hours, piles of paper, …)

The tragic thing is when this also holds true for the art of discovering the information about how usable a given piece of software is.